We are putting together a low-budget DVD as promotional item; we plan to get about 1000 copies professional replicated and all that, so we want it to look decent on TVs and computers alike.
So far, we've had nothing but quality problems. Our source video was all shot using a Canon XL1, captured to raw DV video via Firewire, and edited in Premiere Pro. We're using Adobe Encore as the authoring software. Menus were designed in Photoshop.
The #1 problem we have is that the video just seems pixelated when viewed on a computer monitor or on a projection/plasma TV. Now we realize that 720x480 video is going to look horrible on a big screen no matter what, but I have seen plenty of other video that looks decent, especially on the computer screen. Tons of jaggies all over, etc., even when we are viewing it at 1:1, meaning a 720x480 window.
So we are thinking that maybe we are capturing it wrong, or missing some other important interlacing step or something on the encode. We are using the normal Premiere capture mode, and encoding to the NTSC DV 0.9 preset. No other weird filters or anything.
The other problem is that we want to add a still image to the video as sort of an intro/outro title screen. We've designed some stuff that looks decent in Photoshop, used the proper NTSC preset, applied an NTSC color filter and all that. We bring it into the timeline in Premiere, encode, and on the playback the image looks absolutely horrible on a computer screen. It looks halfways decent on a small 25" analog TV, but I don't get why a 720x480 image added to a 720x480 video would in turn play back at absolutely horrible quality in a 720x480 window on the screen. It just seems like we must be doing something wrong.
Anybody else have any experience doing anything like this? None of us are professionals in this realm, obviously, we're basically just hobbyists with too much money/time to spend on computer programs we don't understand.
Thanks!
